VUE 2016 Leaks #1: Interactive Path Tracer

#1

http://www.e-onsoftware.com/news/blog/

http://e-onsoftware.e-oncontent.com/news/blog/public/Vue/.VUE2016_ToyTrainWM_m.jpg

Hybrid GPU/CPU Interactive Path Tracer

GPU rendering comes to VUE with the new Path Tracer renderer. This renderer naturally and automatically simulates real-life lighting, and automatically calculates many effects that have to be specifically set with other methods, such as soft shadows, depth of field, caustics, ambient occlusion, and indirect lighting.

Path tracing in VUE 2016 is available as an interactive rendering quality in the viewports, as well as an offline rendering engine.

#2

1- In PlantFactory 2016

PlantFactory 2015 introduced the concept of Presets. PlantFactory 2016 now introduces the concept of Preset Variations.

Preset Variations allow you to immediately include subtle differences to your plant (change the number of buds on a blooming flower, or its petal colors for instance).

This new feature allows you to easily add variety to create realistic environments with one single plant species!

2- In VUE 2016

Within VUE 2016, you directly get access to the PlantFactory species presets and variations within the Plant Browser, the Plant Editor and within your EcoSystem population list.

So, at every step of your scene creation process, you are able to select the species you want, the preset you want and the variations you want!

http://www.e-onsoftware.com/news/blog/

#3

Heightfield Terrains - More flexible and a lot more Powerful!

With VUE 2016, we’re introducing a brand new terrain modeling technology, more flexible and a lot more powerful, called “Heightfield Terrains”.

This new technology allows you to add terrain effects that were previously impossible to achieve, such as Hydrological & Thermal Simulations!

Similar to procedural terrains, Heightfield Terrains are based on a function graph, but baked on a fixed-resolution grid. This will give you more flexibility and add more realism to your terrains. Heightfield Terrains are also significantly faster to render!

Heighfield terrains are manually sculptable and parameters can be animated - e.g. to simulate a terrain erosion over time for instance!

And finally, you can easily set up your graph outputs to drive your material presence, directly from within the Terrain Editor interface.

#4

And by the way, if nobody else is mentioning it here, the new (professional) versions of Vue and PlantFactory are out now:
http://www.e-onsoftware.com/products/vue/vue_2016_xstream/
http://www.plantfactory-tech.com